The latter individual, by the way, doesn't have to have any sort of HR background. It could be a sales guru, a supply chain expert – anyone that understands and recognizes the role that culture plays in business success. The example Charan holds up is Bill Conaty at GE, who was a plant manager before he stepped into the CHRO role for 15 years.

If you can't "afford" to take the approach that Charan suggests, at the very least, your team might consider reexamining some of its policies with an eye toward determining what they say about your culture. Certain HR policies are "rooted in fear and guaranteed to drive smart and capable people into the arms of competitors," writes Liz Ryan, a former senior vice president of HR, in a recent Forbes blog, "Nine HR Policies That Drive Good People Away."

Her article is written as a primer for job seekers, but here's a summary of the nine things that suggest your corporate culture is "broken":

1. Writing "chain gang" time-off policies that track every single hour or moment that is spent on personal or sick time. Yes, you need to document vacation and family level for the government (if you're a U.S.-based company), and need to track hourly workers, but the way to encourage the best effort from you team is to put in place "policies that assume your employees are adults," Ryan writes.
2. Creating no latitude policies that stifle creative or prevent people from having independent thoughts
3. Enforcing stack rankings that require managers to list their employees in best-to-worst order
4. Taking back frequent flyer miles employees earn traveling on the company's behalf (does anyone seriously do this?)
5. Requiring people to "prove" that a personal issue (such as a funeral) really took place when they request time off
6. Forbidding managers to provide departing employees with references. "Run away from an organization like this, and if your vendors subscribe to the no-references philosophy, find another vendor who believes in human integrity," Ryan writes. "Don't your customers deserve that much?"
7. Requiring "bell curve" performance reviews that require managers to list at least some of their team as "bad employees" during every review cycle (this dovetails with the stack ranking policy)
8. Monitoring social media activity and explicitly dictating what employees can or cannot say
9. Adopting an anti-moonlighting rule that prohibits any sort of outside employment, not just jobs for competitors (which IS a reasonable policy in Ryan's mind)

If your organization subscribes to any of these practices, it might want to think about what signals they sending to existing or potential employees and whether or not they are worth the paper they are written on.