Lately it seems that almost anything you see on TV or in a commercial eventually ends up with somebody that's the leader of some group deciding that it's improper and that it needs to be boycotted, or at least protested. The latest thing involves a group called One Million Moms and their decision to come out against a Skittles commercial that has a woman kissing a walrus, saying that the commercial promotes bestiality.

As funny as this seems to someone like me, its become the norm. So many people are getting offended by the littlest things, and usually it's the leaders of certain groups that get everybody else riled up by finding a way of making something that was supposed to be funny into a critical issue. It leads me to ask the question "our leaders becoming too sensitive?"

When it comes to things like this I would probably say no. Maybe I'm a skeptic, but I tend to believe that these leaders aren't as offended as they lead us to believe. I think that leaders of groups like this look to find something to rally the troops around to keep everybody's spirit into what those groups are actually about. I mean, sometimes some of the complaints are really so outrageous that it just seems unbelievable that the leaders aren't laughing internally because they've been able to get others to believe they're actually serious about what they're saying.

I have seen this same scenario play out often in business offices. Leadership will either see something happen, or be told something is happening, and suddenly it's a national crisis that must be immediately addressed. These are the kinds of leaders that workers hate having to deal with because in a way it points to management being unstable. After all, people aren't stupid, and if they see management overreacting to minor things all the time it becomes hard for them to take those managers seriously.

In my way of thinking, the only time there were ever any emergencies in the office is when someone's life was in danger. Even if the computers went down I never panicked, though some other people might have. The way I saw it, we could only work with what we had, and if things weren't going right then we did something else until things were working well again. There was always a way to work around the problem, so there was no need to get everybody riled up.

When managers can maintain calm, and pretty much stay even keeled and steady even in the face of perceived disasters, employees will trust them more. And when employees trust, they work better.