Leadership Transformation By Andrea Leigh Capuyan

The Cocoon and the Crucible of Leadership

We inhabit a curious paradox regarding our view of leadership. Called to be stewards, we experience environments where others can transform—to shape the cocoon, if you will. We design cultures, establish rhythms, remove obstacles, and create safety for people to become who God designed them to be. We guard the conditions for metamorphosis. This is active work, strategic work, work that requires our best thinking and most intentional effort.

But we are also called to enter our own cocoon – a crucible – intended for our leadership transformation.

My Metamorphosis

The financial crisis hit hard, month after month of shortfalls. Desires and dreams for growth were sidelined. The weight of responsibility pressed down until I could barely function. As Executive Director, I felt utterly responsible, and the numbers felt like a verdict on my leadership, perhaps even evidence of God’s judgment on my inadequacy.

I entered one of the most transformative seasons of my leadership life. I discovered that the very things that defined me, responsibility and competence, weighed me down. Barriers that kept me from asking for help, from acknowledging my limits, from trusting that God’s work didn’t rise and fall on my performance.

But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you,

 for my power is made perfect in weakness.”

2 Corinthians 12:9

It was during this season of financial challenges that I encountered the steward leader model. This framework reoriented everything I thought I knew about leadership. The shift from control to surrender. The reminder that everything touching me passes through God’s hands first. The liberating truth that God is always at work. He brings results, and He desires my faithfulness, not performance metrics.

This wasn’t a change in leadership style. This was a transformation. I began adopting the identity of a steward.

Through the years, when I reflect on this season, I keep returning to an image from the natural world that captures something profound about how God transforms leaders: the metamorphosis of a butterfly.

The Hidden Work of Transformation

Inside a chrysalis, something both humbling and miraculous occurs. The caterpillar doesn’t simply grow wings while remaining essentially itself. The caterpillar’s body breaks down. Almost completely. Its form gives way, leaving behind only a handful of cells called imaginal discs. These are dormant blueprints that have waited, silent and patient, through the entire phase of the caterpillar’s life. These cells, and only these, will form the butterfly.

Shaping the Cocoon for Others

Inviting others to transformation means we steward our ministries with these questions: What does this team need to flourish? What barriers must I remove, truths must I speak, and boundaries must I protect? We become architects of possibility, crafting environments where dormant potential, ‘imaginal cells’, can finally activate and grow.

This is holy work. When we create conditions for others to shed what enslaves them and step into their calling. We co-labor in God’s creative purposes. We’re not manufacturing transformation; that remains God’s work. We’re tending the space where transformation happens. As we steward, we communicate to others that you are safe to focus on God’s transforming work in your life in this workplace.

The best leaders understand they cannot force metamorphosis. They bear witness; they honor transformation. You cannot make a caterpillar become a butterfly faster. You can protect the cocoon from predators and ensure it hangs in the right light, at the right temperature. But you must trust the process even when nothing visible seems to be happening.

Entering Our Own Unmaking

But then comes our turn. And here, everything we’ve learned about agency and control must be surrendered.

Our leadership failures don’t feel like ‘imaginal cells’ waiting to form something beautiful. They feel like our strength is wasting away. That relationship we mishandled. That moment we led from fear instead of faith, from ego instead of calling. We discover we aren’t who we thought we were. These experiences unmake us. And perhaps that’s precisely their purpose.

God’s transformation of us doesn’t build on our strengths and successes as much as we’d like to believe. Yes, He uses our gifts. But the deepest transformation happens in our undoing. In the moment when our carefully constructed identity as “the leader who has it together” breaks down. When our self-sufficiency melts. When we’re reduced to raw humility, desperate for God to remake what we cannot repair ourselves.

The ‘imaginal cells’ of who we’re truly meant to be have been there all along, dormant beneath our striving, performing, and managing. But they cannot form the butterfly if we cling to the caterpillar’s life.

In my own cocoon season, I had to release the construct of my identity. I had to let God strip away the belief that my competence was what made me valuable, that my ability to handle everything was what made me worthy. What remained when those things fell away felt frighteningly small, but it was enough…the necessary seeds to become a steward. In adopting the posture of faithfulness and surrender, rather than control, and in trusting that God was at work even when I couldn’t see results, I could take flight.

The caterpillar cannot imagine wings. It has no category for flight. And we, in our moments of brokenness, cannot always see what God is creating. We only know our challenges and obstacles.

God knows about those hidden ‘imaginal discs’. He planted them in us before we took our first leadership role, before we knew our first success, before we experienced our first failure. He has always known who we would become. The butterfly was always the plan.

Living in the Tension

We are called to this beautiful, uncomfortable tension. We steward cocoons for others—creating space, providing safety, protecting the process. And we surrender to our own transformation—allowing the unmaking, trusting the darkness, believing that what remains when everything else falls away is enough for God’s renewal.

We lead from this paradox: strong enough to shape environments for others, weak enough to be reshaped ourselves. Wise enough to protect the transformation we steward, humble enough to trust the transformation we cannot see.

The cocoon is both our calling and our crucible. We tend it for others. We submit to it for ourselves. In both, we discover that transformation is always God’s work. We are never the butterfly-maker.

The question isn’t whether we’ll experience this crucible in leadership. We will. The question is whether we’ll resist it or receive it as the very means by which God transforms us into who we are meant to be.

Will we trust the dark work of the cocoon? The caterpillar cannot become the butterfly without the cocoon. And we cannot become who God designed us to be without our own seasons of humbling. He is faithful to complete what He’s begun.

Questions for Reflection

What failure is God inviting you to receive as the means of your transformation?

What are you resisting in His transforming work?

How might the weights you carry—even good things like responsibility and competence—be keeping you from the freedom of steward leadership?

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Andrea Leigh Capuyan serves on the board of the Center for Steward Leader Studies and is the executive director of the LPC. This local ministry helps individuals impacted by unintended pregnancy, reproductive loss, and post-abortion recovery. She also provides coaching and consultation, assisting others to experience abundance as leaders. Andrea is a Credentialed Christian Nonprofit Leader (CCNL) with the Christian Leadership Alliance and holds a Master of Arts degree in Organizational Leadership from York University.

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Andrea Leigh Capuyan will serve as faculty – Check out her workshop!

Difficult Conversations: Move Toward the Funk

This workshop helps leaders transform challenging relationships through biblical principles and practical tools. Discover how Jesus’ love command becomes your pathway to deeper connection and more effective leadership. Outcomes: 1) Discern how loving God with heart, mind, and soul transforms how we relate to others, 2) Practice ways to respond from wisdom rather than react from wounds, developing self-awareness during conflict, and 3) Apply next steps for transforming one challenging relationship.

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