Esau offered to travel alongside Jacob, and Jacob declined. The reason he gave, preserved in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan (Genesis 33:13), sounds like a note from a shepherd's almanac. "My lord knows that the children are tender, and the flocks and cattle giving milk are with me; and if I overdrive them one day, all the flock may die."
Children at the pace of warriors. Nursing mothers at the pace of raiders. It would not work.
The ethics of pace
The rabbis treasured this verse as the foundation of an entire ethic: you cannot push the weak at the pace of the strong. Gidullei habanim, the rearing of children, sets its own clock. Inuk, the nursing of flocks, sets another. A leader who ignores those clocks will arrive at his destination alone, because everything gentle behind him will have died along the way.
This principle echoes through later Jewish law. Parents are commanded to teach Torah to their children according to the child's capacity (Proverbs 22:6). A community must move at the pace of its most vulnerable members. A shepherd is judged not by how fast he travels but by whether his flock arrives intact.
The takeaway: leadership is measured by the slowest person in your care, not the fastest one you could be.