'Being seen as' and 'seeing as'

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide a platform to improve leadership practices through variety engineering in terms of amplifying and attenuating variety.Design/methodology/approach – Chemers's functional integration of image management, relation development and resource deployment as the building blocks of leadership is mapped onto Espejo et al.'s variety engineering individual‐task loop, consisting of cognitive, interactive and task venues.Findings – It is found that traditional leadership can be usefully mapped onto the language of variety engineering.Originality/value – Management is distinguished from leadership. The paper is an early attempt to translate a leadership model into the language of cybernetics.