Tackle situation where your leader overshadows your role and responsibilities

My initial question is why is a senior manager in the backlog refinement session and retrospective?

Aside from that, this is when the misaligned mindsets thwart the 'transformation' efforts.

Sante, this is what I was leading into. There is just so much wrong with the OP statement (not Sonali's fault). From a leadership and organizational perspective, the core fundamentals of what they are 'trying' to do are broken.

Sonali, there is an education and trust gap here. If you have any leverage, try to work on those with leadership - training, discussions, coaching, introduction to leaders from other organizations that were successful, etc. What you describe is micro-management and an anti-pattern in an 'Agile' environment, or anywhere for that matter

Leave the job. Go for other place. Just in case you can not do that then use some selling methods to be prepare to talk and work with her/him. The method I used with success in this type of situations is "solution selling" or "SPIN" selling selling method. It helped me to understand the pain and to talk with this type of people. You need a change and to produce a change you have to remember the Newton´s Laws of Universal Movement. Perhaps this article could help you on taking other point of view: projectmanagement.com: https://www.projectmanagement.com/blog-pos...zational-change

It may be the "right" thing to do in their eyes, but it isn't Scrum, nor is it Agile. The senior manager is a stakeholder, and there are several avenues for knowing if the team is doing the right job, not least being the initial requirements analysis, prioritizing the backlog, observing daily Scrums, participating in the Sprint Reviews, staying the hell out of Retrospectives, walking past and asking questions of the Agile/Kanban board, viewing/requesting the status reports, speaking/meeting with the PO on project/product matters, speaking/meeting with the Scrum Master on project/process matters, and the list goes on. You can't have a self-empowered autonomous team who are responsible for the the way they work, being told how to do that work by someone not on the team. In that case you might have waterfall wrapped up in a tin-foil Agile veneer with iterations to lend it credibility.

Don't oppose the senior - instead, 'adjust' his thinking. Talk to him privately and explain the importance of sticking to the agenda, and explain that discussing topics not on the agenda harms the team's performance.

I concur with Eric on this.
Try to understand his needs or maybe participate him in the agenda creation, talk to him privately and try to influence his behavior.

Sonali -

Coaching, 1:1.

Help him understand that he is an observer in normal Scrum ceremonies and not an active participant and if he has concerns to raise then he should bring those to you outside of those ceremonies.

Kiron